From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay-and of history-itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented-but armed-aimlessness. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. Please note: This collection includes content that has been previously released in The Last Archive podcast.Ī book to be read and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best.įew, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. history -from the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 to the 1977 National Women’s Convention to t he first election predicted by computer, and more - Lepore uncovers the secrets of the past the way a detective might, hot on the trail of the killer of truth. Listeners will follow Lepore through a fascinating, erudite, and antic journey through the thorny problem of how we know what we know, and why it seems sometimes as if we don't know anything at all anymore. In a series of spellbinding stories, Lepore investigates murders, hoaxes, lies and delusions to reckon with the instability of truth and fiction in the twenty-first century. In Who Killed Truth? acclaimed Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore traces the origins of our current post-truth crisis. Many historians and cultural observers argue we live in a post-truth world- but if truth is dead, who killed it? And how did it die? Join celebrated historian Jill Lepore as she cracks the case by examining key moments in the history of truth, doubt, and evidence across the last century.

Jill lepore these truths